The future of parking Why simplifying your estate might be the smartest move you make this year Car parks gather complexity over time. A payment kiosk gets installed, then a barrier system and maybe even an EV charger. Each addition made sense when it went in. But nobody tends to step back and look at what the car park has actually become: a patchwork of systems, installed at different times, by different suppliers, for different reasons, none of which were designed to work together. That accumulation is the starting point for most of the problems site owners deal with day to day. Maintenance schedules that overlap. Hardware that needs replacing before it’s paid for itself. Visitor complaints that stem from confusion rather than intent. Revenue that leaks through gaps nobody’s monitoring. And while the infrastructure has been stacking up, the job description of a car park has changed completely. What a car park is expected to do now Five years ago, most car parks existed to do one thing: let people park. Now site owners are expected to generate revenue from it, protect priority spaces, support sustainability targets, deliver a smooth visitor experience and keep pace with new technology. That’s a fundamentally different ask, and the infrastructure on most sites wasn’t built for it. The businesses getting the most from their parking estates aren’t the ones with the most technology on site. They’re the ones that have stepped back, looked at the whole picture and asked a simple question: does everything on this car park still earn its place? That question tends to lead in five directions. 1. How visitors experience the car park Parking is the first and last thing a visitor does on your site. If payment is confusing, slow or unreliable, that frustration carries into the rest of the visit. It shapes how people feel about your business, your tenants and your services. The payment journey is a customer experience touchpoint, and it deserves the same attention as anything happening inside the building. A growing number of site owners are finding that moving to digital-first payment, where visitors pay from their own phone rather than queuing at a machine, removes the friction that generates complaints without removing options for people who prefer other methods. 2. How resilient the operation is When a car park relies on a single kiosk for all payment transactions, that kiosk becomes a single point of failure. If it goes down for servicing or loses connectivity, revenue stops until it’s fixed. Spreading payment across digital channels means revenue isn’t dependent on one piece of hardware in one location. That’s a straightforward resilience gain, and it also means fewer moving parts for site teams to manage. 3. Where the money actually goes Every piece of physical hardware on a car park carries ongoing cost. Maintenance, consumables, cleaning, cash collection, repairs, connectivity. Kiosks carry the heaviest share of that burden. The public sector is already moving. A 2023 BBC investigation found that at least 22 UK councils had removed some or all of their pay-and-display machines, with half of all London boroughs doing the same.1 These aren’t theoretical arguments. They’re financial decisions being made by organisations that have run the numbers. Simplifying the physical estate changes the cost profile. Fewer assets means less maintenance, less exposure to vandalism, and a clearer picture of where revenue is actually going. 4. What it means for sustainability This is one that catches people off guard. We estimate that a mains-powered payment kiosk consumes roughly 600 to 1,000 kWh of electricity per year, comparable to running a domestic fridge-freezer.2 Internal heating and cooling systems run year-round to protect the electronics, regardless of how many transactions the machine processes. As more visitors pay digitally, those machines handle fewer transactions, but the energy consumption stays the same. Then there’s the waste. The UK produces approximately 11.2 billion till receipts per year, the vast majority on thermal paper coated with chemicals classified as endocrine disruptors.3 These receipts cannot be recycled through standard paper streams because the coating contaminates recycling batches.4 When 72% of UK shoppers already choose a digital receipt when offered one, every thermal receipt a kiosk prints is harder to justify.5 For site owners with carbon reduction targets or ESG reporting obligations, these are not marginal concerns. The raw materials, the continuous energy draw, the non-recyclable waste and the eventual e-waste at the end of life all contribute to a footprint that grows harder to defend as digital alternatives mature.6 5. How ready the estate is for what comes next Vehicles are becoming more connected. Payment is moving into apps, sat-navs and in-car systems. Integration between parking, EV charging and wider mobility platforms will keep expanding. The direction is clear, even if the pace varies. And some of these shifts aren’t optional. The UK’s 3G network shutdown in 2024-25 forced many organisations to choose between expensive hardware upgrades and removing machines entirely.7 That kind of forced obsolescence is a reminder of what happens when your infrastructure depends on connectivity standards that someone else controls. Fixed hardware is the least adaptable element on a modern car park. Digital-first systems can integrate with new platforms as they emerge without requiring physical changes to the site. The simplification question Most car parks weren’t designed. They evolved. And the result, in a lot of cases, is an estate that’s more expensive to run, harder to maintain and less effective than it needs to be. The opportunity isn’t to strip everything out. It’s to look at the estate with fresh eyes and make sure every element is pulling its weight. The car parks that perform best over the next few years will be the ones where the infrastructure is lean, the visitor experience is clean, and the operation runs without depending on any single piece of hardware to keep the revenue flowing. At Parkingeye, we work with site owners across more than 4,000 locations to simplify how their car parks operate. If you’re starting to ask whether your estate is working as hard as it could, that’s a conversation worth having. Contact Us Sources 1 BBC investigation, June 2023. Data collated from 244 councils across England. Reported by BM Magazine. 2 Component-level estimate based on standby power draw, screen operation, thermal printing, card processing and heating elements. Energy conversion factor: DESNZ 2025 UK Greenhouse Gas Reporting Conversion Factors (0.19553 kg CO₂e per kWh). 3 Business Waste UK; thermal paper chemical classification per Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and multiple peer-reviewed studies including Bernier & Vandenberg (2017), PLOS ONE. 4 Cornwall Council recycling guidance; multiple UK local authority waste guidelines. 5 Talking Retail, 2024 survey; CXM Today. 6 Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by ITU and UNITAR. Only 22.3% of global e-waste is formally collected and recycled. 7 BBC investigation, June 2023; Local Government Association statement on 3G network shutdown impact.
